Abstract While modal theory has been part of Western musical instruction for over a millennium, critical histories of music theory have gradually come to question the pertinence of modality to practical composition throughout most of this period. Nevertheless, modal nomenclatures are still widely used in music education, as well as in studies of folk and popular repertoires. This position paper argues that the persistence of modal analysis is best explained through a view of mode as an open concept rather than any set of concrete compositional properties. An unbound, historically emergent construct that resists fixed identity criteria, mode is not intrinsic to composition but projected onto it through institutionalized practice to fulfil a variety of regulative functions. The paper zooms in on a so-called romantic conception of mode, in which modality is reimagined according to cultural sensibilities and a perception of tonal space that only became available at the turn of the nineteenth century. Informed by scale-degree theory, this incarnation of the mode concept is largely responsible for the perpetuation of the dichotomous view of mode as the deviant scale type of various musical Others.
Netta Huebscher (Thu,) studied this question.